He was, in all, so clean, so sweet, so golden, that I backed off, afraid he must be American and about to convert me to some cult.
Do you know you can learn from pain?’ But, he explains, the circumstances must be right. To learn, you must have a future:
Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artifact of your mental illness.
Wolsey always said that the making of a treaty is the treaty. It doesn't matter what the terms are, just that there are terms. It's the goodwill that matters. When that runs out, the treaty is broken,...
Where is Richard, do you know?Chopping onions on the back step. Oh, you mean Master Richard? Upstairs. Eating. Where's anybody?
When a man admits guilt we have to believe him. We cannot set ourselves to proving to him that he is wrong. Otherwise the law courts would never function.
What was England, before Wolsey? A little offshore island, poor and cold.
We shall have to develop a hand signal for Back off, our prince is fucking this man's daughter. He is surprised the Italians have not done it.
They are en route to Farnham, a small hunting party, when a report is galloped along the road: cases of plague have appeared in the town. Henry, brave on the battlefield, pales almost before their eye...
The page of an accounts book is there for your use, like a love poem. It’s not there for you to nod and then dismiss it; it’s there to open your heart to possibility. It’s like the scriptures: it’s th...
Some people know they are condemned; some have time to pray, and others die struggling and screaming, fighting to their last breath. An irate killer stamps in to the tribunal—Use your heads, give us a...
Saint-Just read for the next two hours his report on the plots of the Dantonist faction. He had imagined, when he wrote it, that he had the accused man before him; he had not amended it. If Danton wer...
Law of Suspects. Suspects are those: who have in any way aided tyranny (royal tyranny, Brissotin tyranny...); who cannot show that they have performed their civic duties; who do not starve, and yet ha...
It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
If life is a chain of gold, sometimes God hangs a charm on it.
He told me that you had a loathing of those in the religious life. That was why he found you diligent in his work. That was not the reason. He looks up. May I speak? Oh, for God’s sake, Henry cries. I...
All that evening he talked to the Candle of Arras, in a low confidential tone. When you get down to it, he thought, there's not much difference between politics and sex; it's all aboutpower. He didn't...
A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their...
Why doesn’t Yasmin distinguish … between private morality and public order?
It's all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it's no good at all if you don't have a plan for tomorrow.